INTERPRETARE ORAZIO CON ORAZIO? A PROPOSITO DI CARMINA, LIBRO IV

In the work “Mutat terra vices. Identità, cambiamento e memoria culturale nell’ultimo Orazio” (Palermo 2010), I focused my attention on interpretative and methodological questions concerning the last Horatian book of carmina. In this paper the aim is to demonstrate how the topic of change and discontinuity points out, on the surface of these poems, the presence of conspicuous interferences between the execution of a role by authorial "persona", and the expression, at the same time, of role distance. I mean here especially to describe how gift, reciprocity and exchange in patronage frames contributed to the definition of Horace’s self and of his official duties as interpreter of common memory.